Life in the Old West

The westward rush of the railroads across the Plains and westward led to an onward march of an interesting social characteristic that gained a special name: “hell on wheels.” More than just a curse or profane expression, “hell on wheels” was a Westernism for a very specific advancement of a very unusual type of a sort of “portable town.”

The expression “hell on wheels” referred to the motley collection of tents, board shacks, furniture, furnishings, and people who were moved along by the railroad itself ahead of the advancing rail-head and set up near the tracks for the benefit of the railroad workers. This ragged collection of shanties and shady people usually centered around a large tent and included a group of smaller tents and shacks that housed all the gamblers, prostitutes, and fast-money merchants who met the needs of the rail workers and others involved in moving the tracks westward.

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Widespread use of horses by Native American tribal groups and the rampant rush of people hungry for gold in the Rockies ultimately altered the nature of the Great Plains region as much as railroads and farmers may have during America’s westward expansion.

That’s the premise of historian Elliott West’s fascinating look at Old West history titled “The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.” Originally published by the University Press of Kansas in 1998, this fascinating look at life in the Plains, Colorado Territory, and the Rockies during the 1850s and 1860s is well worth getting, if you’re at all interested in the economic and cultural forces that shaped the American West.

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The first wagon trains headed westward along the overland trails — the most famous was the Oregon Trail — from Missouri in 1841, and a major motivation for those making the long, often tortuous journey was economic: Following the Panic of 1837 (a fearsome Depression by even today’s standards), wages throughout America had fallen by 30-50 percent. There were no unemployment figures kept at the time, of course, but had there been, they would have been horrific. Major public demonstrations by out of work residents of Philadelphia and New York City brought out hundreds of thousands of people in 1839 and 1840.

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I ran onto a wonderful little book in my library which I had forgotten, and wonderful it truly is: It looks at America’s Westward settlement through women’s eyes, by giving excerpts from their diaries of their westward emigration.

The book is “Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey,” by Lillian Schlissel. Historian Schlissel is professor emerita of Brooklyn College-CUNY, where she was director of American studies. Her book was published in 1982 and reissued in, I believe, 2004. The copy I have is a tattered paperback of the 1982 original. You can still find the book from time to time on eBay and Amazon, and I urge you to get a copy. (If you click on the title of the book above it will take you to any copies currently for sale on Amazon.) It is a real eye-opener that abolishes many of the stereotypes of the rugged, “manly” settlers who tamed the West.

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During the 1830s, diseases brought to the Great Plains region, chiefly smallpox, devastated many Plains Indian groups. This was nothing new in the cultural mingling and cultural conflicts between Native Americans and European traders/settlers. But it was one of the earliest documented pandemics in what we now call the Old West.

According to historian Paul H. Carlson in his excellent book “The Plains Indians,” this smallpox outbreak was started when deckhands in an American Fur Company steamboat moving up the Missouri River came in contact with members of several tribal groups living along the Missouri. By 1837, Carlson says, thousands of Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa people had died. He suggests that probably half of the Arikara and Hidatsa population of 4,500 died in this 1837 outbreak. In addition, he estimates this smallpox outbreak killed “virtually all” of the 1,600 Mandans living in the Upper Missouri region.

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Blizzards in Old West days were catastrophic throughout most of the West, particularly throughout the Great Plains. For obvious reasons, severe snow, strong winds, and poor visibility combined with near-zero or sub-zero temperatures were dangerous for anyone living in isolated and rural areas. Combine that with the openness of the terrain and dependence upon cattle and stored crops for food, and streams, creeks, or poorly dug wells for water, and blizzards were a far greater disaster then than they are now.

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While kicking the dust off some boxes of old books, I ran onto a little volume I forgot I have. So I pulled it out of the box, blew some clouds of dust around the room, and took a close look at this little jewel. The title in English is “The Rocky Mountain West in 1867,” and in French it is titled “Le gand-ouest des Etats-Unis.” What I have is the English translation done by Wilson O. Clough. The original — and I do not speak or read any sort of French — was a collection of letters written by Louis L. Simonin, a French mining engineer and professor of geology. The letters were written to an unidentified friend in Paris.

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Maybe you’ve never thought about this question before, but in terms of life in the “Old West,” we need to ask the question I’m asking in the title of this post: Where and when did “the West” begin?

You could say, along with many reputable historians, that “the West” was a concept in the minds of most European Americans from the time they found themselves on this continent and looked toward the setting sun. Indeed, American history has always spoken of “the West” or “Western regions,” even when that meant the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Smokies, etc., “Western” positions on the continent far east of what we think of in popular culture as “the Old West.”

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The more naive view of westward expansion in the U.S. views it from the standpoint of hearty pioneers risking their lives journeying into unknown wilderness to make a new, better life for themselves and their families.

Cynics point out that many “indigenous” people already lived in these lands and weren’t happy to have those lands dominated by newcomers who felt they could make land their personal property, instead of treating the land as freely belonging to everyone — in other words, the cynic would say, the pioneers weren’t expanding into new land, they were conquering and then displacing or killing the original “owners” of the western lands.

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